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Brief Mention
- American Literature
- Duke University Press
- Volume 76, Number 3, September 2004
- pp. 629-636
- Article
- Additional Information
American Literature 76.3 (2004) 629-636
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Brief Mention
Editions
A versatile nineteenth-century New Orleans writer, King produced several histories, novels, short stories, biographies, and articles. She was lauded for transcending the local-color genre and for her depictions of both white and black women in a variety of locations. These journal entries record her travels across the United States and Europe, reveal her thoughts on political issues as well as her personal trials, and provide a more informal, candid portrait of King than her published autobiography. Heidari's introduction provides historical context for the letters, showing how they convey the complex position of Southern women writers after the Civil War.
The letters in this collection, exchanged during the thirty-year friendship between two influential figures in American modernist poetry, discuss the personal lives of each man and reveal their thoughts on the state of publishing and poetry in America, shedding new light on their own work and the work of contemporaries like Cummings, Aiken, Eliot, and Pound.
The intimacy, loyalty, and lively intellectual exchange captured in this correspondence reveal the intense bond between Duncan and Levertov and depict the state of American poetry and cultural history in the mid-twentieth century. In nearly five hundred letters, Duncan and Levertov address spirituality, the importance of poetry, and their political and ethical differences. The editors [End Page 629] provide a comprehensive introduction, notes, chronology, and glossary of names.
General
In this study of intertextual influences on The Scarlet Letter, Kopley finds echoes of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, and Ebenezer Wheelwright in Hawthorne's literary imagination. The final chapter suggests that Hawthorne's borrowing of formal conventions, plot, and thematic structure from works like Robinson Crusoe, The Salem Belle, and Arthur Gordon Pym helped him define his own novel's investment in "providential" themes.
Stover draws on literary texts by four nineteenth-century African American women (Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, and Susie King Taylor) to demonstrate how words, rhythms, sounds, silences, looks, and posture convey veiled meanings. Stover argues that black women's language is a "mother tongue," incorporating elements of the oral traditions of West African Yoruba culture, which serves as both a mode of expression and a linguistic and physical stance of subversive resistance to the oppression these women faced as slaves and servants.
Nineteenth-century anarchism is often understood in relation to debates and concerns of the period, including fears of degeneracy and revolution, loss of autonomy in the modern era, and social and economic changes. Phillips contextualizes anarchist rhetoric in the cultural discourse of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain and the United States. His analysis of fictional and nonfictional works by Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Frank Norris, Charlotte Teller, and Joseph Conrad provides a comprehensive discussion of how anarchism functioned as a scapegoat for social problems, the effects of its reliance on violence, and how its logic and ideals of individual liberty shaped modernist understandings of the twentieth century. [End Page 630]
Ashton traces collaborative authorship in America in the late...
